Using participatory scenario planning to explore the synergies and trade‐offs from upland treescape expansion

Abstract The future of land use in the UK uplands is highly debated, with growing interest in increasing tree cover and other land use changes, alongside a desire to maintain traditional land use patterns and practices. Treescape expansion is likely to result in synergies and trade‐offs between different outcomes, so integrating stakeholder preferences into future scenarios will be important for understanding social acceptance or conflicts and for promoting pathways towards sustainable land use in the future. We used Participatory Scenario Planning to create spatially explicit land use and tree cover scenarios to 2050 in two UK upland landscapes (the North Pennines & Dales in England and the Elenydd in Mid Wales). Stakeholders were asked to list their preferred land use interventions, along with spatial criteria determining their preferred location in the landscape. We then created future scenarios and modelled the impact on greenhouse gas emissions, livestock numbers, timber production, recreation, water run‐off and bird populations. Stakeholder‐led scenarios resulted in an increase in total tree cover from 2.5% to 3.3%–9.7% in the North Pennines & Dales, and from 9.7% to 10.1%–26.8% in the Elenydd. With increasing tree cover, we found positive impacts on greenhouse emissions and water run‐off (both of which declined), woodland birds and nature‐based recreation (both of which increased) and mixed outcomes on timber. On the contrary, increasing tree cover was associated with a reduction in livestock numbers and upland birds. The potential decline of upland bird communities was of particular concern to all stakeholder groups that saw a decline in their scenario. Our methodology provides unique insights into stakeholder‐preferred treescape expansion, which could be expanded to other landscapes and additional interests. Further work should disentangle how future land use scenarios could reduce trade‐offs while still delivering synergies to other ecosystem services. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.